Week 23: "Puc-Man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia

You might have noticed I left this international picture sleeve off last week. It gets special consideration for a couple reasons. First off, it's technically Buckner & Garcia covering their own song.

I seem to have misplaced the e-mail that told the story, but my memory is that Columbia wanted to release the song in Japan, where Pac-Man had originated. Except there, it was Puck Man. You can see Wikipedia for the oft-repeated story of why it was changed. (Flyer from The Arcade Flyer Archive.)

Puck Man flyer from Japan

I'm not sure how the jump was made from "Puck Man" to "Puc-Man". Most likely it was simply a miscommunication or a lack of research. But regardless, it at least sounds the same regardless of the spelling.

 

As you can imagine, neither Buckner nor Garcia spoke Japanese, so they couldn't re-record the entire song. But they could redo all the parts where the game was named. In fact, Garcia only had to redo the choruses! Did you ever notice "Pac-Man" is only said in the chorus?

So -- again, going from memory -- they flew out to California and Garcia redid the choruses. They also had to have a different set of backup singers redo the backup vocals. Drop all those new vocals in place of the old ones and voila: "Puc-Man Fever"!

I believe they did go to the trouble of also having the new backup singers redo the, "To the right", just before the guitar solo, just so it all sounded consistent. Judge for yourself, but then come back, because we're not done!

Another technicality is that this isn't really a picture sleeve. The actual sleeve containing the 45 is fairly plain. But there's a two-sided insert with the graphic on the front. From my understanding, this wasn't uncommon for Japanese 45s.

Finally, let's talk about the B-side. You might have noticed it said "Mousetrap" on the insert's front. It also says that on the insert's back and on the record! But it lies. (Well, maybe.) The second song is actually the instrumental version of "Do the Donkey Kong"!!!

Now perhaps not all the "Puc-Man Fever" 45s are like this. Some may actually have "Mousetrap" on the B-side. But my copy doesn't. Discogs does list both a regular version and a mispress with "Do the Donkey Kong", but I don't know how much research has been done.

So, there you go. More than you ever wanted to know about "Puc-Man Fever".

What's that? You want to hear the "Do the Donkey Kong" instrumental? Sorry, I'm saving that for DtDK month in June!